What you should set up first
Four settings without which the rest is of little use. You will find them under Moderation → Settings.
The escalation ladder
Without it, every warning only goes into the log, and your team has to keep track itself of who stood out how often. With it, the bot acts on its own from defined thresholds onwards.
You will find it under Auto-Moderation → Global Options, it belongs there deliberately, because it interacts with the Auto-Moderation violations.
| Setting | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Escalation ladder active | Off means: warnings are still counted, but they do not trigger any automatic penalty. |
| Timeout from … warnings | From this number on, the member is muted. 0 switches the step off. |
| Timeout duration | In minutes. Discord allows 28 days at most. |
| Kick from … warnings | From this number on, the member is removed from the server. They can come back with a new invite. |
| Ban from … warnings | From this number on, a ban is issued. 0 by default, so off, an automatic ban is a harsh measure. |
Warn automatically
A switch in the same block connects the two systems: Warn automatically makes sure that every Auto-Moderation violation additionally counts as a real warning. Without it, Auto-Moderation does delete messages, but the escalation ladder never hears about it.
Whether you want that depends on the server. On a large, open server it makes sense, because otherwise repeat offenders work their way through with many small violations. On a small server among people who know each other it quickly leads to timeouts for trivialities.
How the notices are presented
How the moderation notice looks in the log channel is set in the Appearance block at the very top of the moderation panel: as an image card, as an embed or both. For logs we recommend the embed, it stays searchable, and the reason and case number can be copied out. More on this under Image cards or embeds.
Looking up cases
Every action gets a case number. Through the dashboard you can view a member's cases even when the log channel has long since moved on. That is particularly useful for appeals: you see at a glance whether somebody stood out for the first time or for the fifth.
Common pitfalls
- The bot cannot ban somebody. Almost always the target person's role sits above the bot's role. Discord refuses that, drag the bot role upwards.
- The DM does not arrive. Many users have disabled direct messages from server members. The bot cannot get around that; the action still takes effect, and the failure is recorded in the log.
- The timeout is lifted again immediately. Then another bot or a moderator has intervened. The log shows who.
- The escalation does not kick in. Check whether “Escalation ladder active” is switched on and that the threshold is not set to 0, 0 means that the step is switched off.